The Santa Maria likely found

Christopher Columbus Ship The Santa Maria May Have Been Found

Bill Chappell - NPR - May 13, 2014

It's been missing for more than 500 years. But now there are reports that the Santa Maria, the largest ship among the trio that made Christopher Columbus' first expedition to North America, may be found. Undersea explorer Barry Clifford says he thinks he has found the ship in waters off of Haiti's coast.

"All the geographical, underwater topography and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that this wreck is Columbus' famous flagship, the Santa Maria," Clifford tells Britain's . "The Haitian government has been extremely helpful — and we now need to continue working with them to carry out a detailed archaeological excavation of the wreck."

Clifford is a well-known wreck hunter, having found the pirate ship and former slave vessel , which sank off the coast of Cape Cod in 1717. That discovery led to a project with .

The Santa Maria sank after hitting reefs off the Haitian coast around Christmas of 1492, months after arriving from Spain. It is believed that Columbus ordered some of the ship's timbers stripped from the wreck in order to build a fort on land near the shore.

According to The Independent, Clifford closed in on the Santa Maria's possible location by combining two separate historical sources. After archaeologists announced new details suggesting the location of Columbus' fort in Haiti in 2003, Clifford used information in the explorer's diary to narrow down a possible location for the Santa Maria's sinking.

It turned out that Clifford's team had already located a wreck in that spot, in 2003. Now they're working to prove its identity as the ship that sailed from Spain along with two smaller ships, the Pinta and the Niña.
But verifying the wreck's identity will be harder now than it would have been in 2003, when Clifford took photos of the site that included a cannon like what the Santa Maria would have carried. When they returned recently, "all the key visible diagnostic objects including the cannon had been looted by illicit raiders," The Independent's archaeology correspondent, David Keys, reports.

Professor Charles Beeker, who directs the Indiana University's Office of Underwater Science and who has visited the wreck with Clifford, tells Keys that there's "some very compelling evidence" that the wreck is the Santa Maria. But he adds that a full excavation must be carried out to be sure.

The Santa Maria was a carrack, a craft that was "the definitive beast of burden of the Age of Exploration," according to the site . "Magellan, for example, had an all-carrack fleet with which he set to circumnavigate the globe in 1519."

One of the ship's advantages was that it was roomy enough for plenty of provisions — a capacity that could also be used to bring treasure back to an expedition's sponsor.

Clifford tells The Independent he'd like the ship to stay in Haiti:

"Ideally, if excavations go well and depending on the state of preservation of any buried timber, it may ultimately be possible to lift any surviving remains of the vessel, fully conserve them and then put them on permanent public exhibition in a museum in Haiti.

"I believe that, treated in this way, the wreck has the potential to play a major role in helping to further develop Haiti's tourism industry in the future."

.

Erickson good... Columbus bad?

The Viking Leif Erickson landed in the Americas sometime about the year 1,000 AD, before Columbus did under the Spanish flag. In fact, Erickson landed on the North American mainland, whereas Columbus landed in the Bahamas. Somehow, via "political correctness," Columbus is in question, while Erickson is not. Why?

Even President Obama, himself a revisionist regarding European colonization, gave the following presidential proclamation regarding "Leif Erickson Day" in 2009. As you can clearly see in this proclamation, Obama continually praises Erickson. I don't think anyone would be going too far out on a limb to state that he absolutely would NOT say a single word of praise for Columbus. Why?

The annual "Leif Erickson Day" is held each and every year without protesters or controversy, while any Columbus Day celebration is marked with much unrest. Often, it's centered around racial unrest. Certainly the Vikings did as much raiding and plundering as the Conquistadors later did, but the Vikings almost always raided other Europeans, while the Conquistadors conquered the Amerindians. Also, the Vikings did not usually occupy conquered lands, while the Spanish did.

That last point brings up another series of questions. The overwhelming percentage of Columbus Day protesters seem to be of Mexican and Anglo-Saxon descent, the very descendants or partial-descendants of the supposed horrible oppressors themselves! Of course, European-Hispanics were the ones who conquered most of the land in the Americas, killed most of the Amerindians, imported most of the slaves from West Africa, and took most of the gold and resources. Okay, that could be a reason, since Columbus sailed under the flag of Spain, while the Vikings simply stayed for awhile and left. However, the protesters don't seem to be interested in acknowledging these facts at all... ?

To digress, although Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Columbo) was specifically of our folk, we should also share in on Leif Erickson's voyage to North America. The Winnili (later the "Langobards") were originally from Scandinavia, although they had left six or seven hundred years before Erickson's landing in North America. It should also be mentioned that other ancient civilizations east of the Atlantic Ocean had reached the Americas, but the evidence has either been suppressed or is not entirely adequate.

I wish that there was a good way to end this posting, but there is not. Columbus is denigrated because his discovery led to the colonization of the Americas by Europeans, and to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The fact that those "Europeans" were mostly from Spain and Portugal (Hispanic) doesn't interest the Columbus Day protesters in the slightest. In other words, to be very blunt, a self-loathing Anglo-Saxon protester would never dream of criticizing Hispanic colonization and slavery; while Mexican protesters don't seem very interested in any "Hispanic-guilt" concept either. They appear to only motivated by a dislike for anything European or White. Even if that were not entirely true for many of them, then why the dismissal of the important underlying facts?? The mistreatment of the Amerindians, and the establishment of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, was predominantly a Hispanic-phenomenon, more-so than a European one.

.